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Comments on news posted 2012-12-28 09:54:24: Data collected from BitTorrent swarms continues to indicate that the movie studios and even the Department of Justice aren't without fault when it comes to piracy among employees. ..


ropeguru
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join:2001-01-25
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ropeguru

Premium Member

I think

The courts should start taking the stance that until the industries start applying their law suits across the board, then they will all be thrown out of court. Would be interesting to see who gets named when the studios and government agencies start getting takedown notices along with court papers.

Transmaster
Don't Blame Me I Voted For Bill and Opus
join:2001-06-20
Cheyenne, WY

1 edit

Transmaster

Member

Yes,look at what members the RIAA where doing on youtube

Bunch of crooks top to bottom, they are calling out people who do to them what they do on a gigantic scale to everybody else. Talk abouit ripping people off look at the latest Rolling Stone Release Grrr!, I am not a fan of the Stones never have been but big time fans, people that have the Stones entire discography, and I mean everthing. are complaining about this ripoff.

The Youtube story:
»www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/ ··· 92.story

FFH5
Premium Member
join:2002-03-03
Tavistock NJ

FFH5

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Engaging in piracy? or join swarms to catch pirates?

Or maybe they were just collecting info on pirates to catch them.

cdru
Go Colts
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Re: Yes,look at what members the RIAA where doing on youtube

How is this story describing a rip off?

skeechan
Ai Otsukaholic
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Re: Engaging in piracy? or join swarms to catch pirates?

Read the article, they were sharing OTHER studio's properties. That would be really nice of Sony to be looking out for Time Warner.
silbaco
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silbaco

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Ok.

Okay. So some employees that work at these companies and in the DHS pirate content. That doesn't mean these companies and the DHS pirate. It is definitely against their IT usage policies, as it is in nearly all businesses. But as we all know, that doesn't stop employees. Especially in the DHS, being a government agency. At one time or another it is pretty safe to say all businesses will have employees that engage in piracy. It is unavoidable. But it is safe to say if they employees got caught, they would be written up or canned.

Just because they have employees breaking the law doesn't mean it gives you rights to break the law.

Pirate515
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Re: Engaging in piracy? or join swarms to catch pirates?

said by skeechan:

Read the article, they were sharing OTHER studios' properties. That would be really nice of Sony to be looking out for Time Warner.

Exactly. There are music studios downloading movies, TV shows, software, games, etc. and vice versa. A typical example of "Do as I say, not as I do".

Another thing is, what kind of brain-dead system/network admins do these places employ to actually allow this sort of thing to happen? Most corporations of their size have their corporate networks firewalled/proxied and have measures in place to detect/block P2P traffic among other things. For example, the place where I work using P2P is against company policy, you wouldn't be able to get it to work with our network setup even if you wanted to, and if corporate security catches any P2P-like activity originating from your machine, you'd most likely be fired on the spot.

skeechan
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Re: Ok.

The DOJ should prosecute their own before going after anyone else. The labels should investigate and extort from their own employees just as they do 10 year old girls and grandmothers.

Labels have a hard time justifying "damages" in the hundreds of thousands when they do nothing to stop infringement in their own ranks. Obviously piracy isn't the problem they claim it to be.
skeechan

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Re: Engaging in piracy? or join swarms to catch pirates?

Well obviously piracy isn't a big problem given the labels and studios have no interest in controlling it within their own organizations.
silbaco
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Re: Ok.

Privacy rights can make prosecution very difficult. Especially in the DOJ/DHS, as being federal employees gives them significant privacy rights. It makes it significantly harder to catch and fire them.

NormanS
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said by silbaco:

Just because they have employees breaking the law doesn't mean it gives you rights to break the law.

No, but it does mean that the TLAs and Corporations should also participate in "Six Strikes", and such.
NormanS

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said by silbaco:

Privacy rights can make prosecution very difficult. Especially in the DOJ/DHS, as being federal employees gives them significant privacy rights. It makes it significantly harder to catch and fire them.

Do you mean to say that the GD watchdogs have more privacy than the rest of us? Talk about a major injustice!
Kearnstd
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said by silbaco:

Just because they have employees breaking the law doesn't mean it gives you rights to break the law.

True but it could bite them in the ass down the road in court. If company B has employees pirating from Company A. And B is suing a college student for piracy on torrents, Not much could stop a judge from tossing the case and citing the fact that the company cannot even clean up its own house before going after others.

skeechan
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skeechan

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Companies are free to pick and choose who they sue so ultimately their own rampant piracy is largely irrelevant unless some local AG goes after them for something which is unlikely given their connections.

What it does do is invalidate their claims of piracy being a "problem" given they don't bother to clean up their own messes.
silbaco
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They have business accounts. Business accounts will never have 6 strike policies.
travanx
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Re: Engaging in piracy? or join swarms to catch pirates?

At one of the previous places I worked for they would sit you down with the owners in the conference room with a printed log and talk to you about what you were doing on company time. They were pretty lenient until it got really out of hand. I couldn't believe they were keylogging everyone until some coworkers started talking about being careful of what you do while at that job.

Pirate515
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Re: Ok.

said by silbaco:

Privacy rights can make prosecution very difficult. Especially in the DOJ/DHS, as being federal employees gives them significant privacy rights. It makes it significantly harder to catch and fire them.

What privacy rights? I think it has been long established that when using your employer's computers, network or other equipment, you have no right or expectation of privacy whatsoever. As long as you are using your employer's equipment, they can snoop on you all they want and if they catch you breaking company policy or the law, they are fully within their rights to fire you or sell you out to the authorities.

When it comes to government employees, they probably have even less privacy than those working for private companies. Correct me if I'm wrong, but working for organizations such as DoJ/DHS requires all sorts of government clearances. To get these clearances, these individuals need to submit themselves to background checks. Depending on how high up their positions are, these checks can be very intrusive (some look into their personal lives in great detail). In many cases, not only are these checks required to get these jobs, they also must be re-run in scheduled/unscheduled intervals to keep these jobs.

The main reason why many companies including the one I work for block P2P is to avoid liability altogether. If a home user get caught downloading copyrighted material(s), the ISP hands over their info. If a "bad apple" employee at some company gets caught, it is the company who will probably get sued. Since companies can be held liable for actions of their employees, it's not clear if that company will be off the hook if they rat out the employee who actually did the deed. In any case, from corporate perspective, it's much easier to prevent this sort of thing from happening than to let it happen and deal with consequences later. That's why many companies block, monitor and take action against employees who engage in such.

I guess in this case, these record labels and studios are practicing professional courtesy by not going after their "brothers" and "sisters" in the business. It would be pretty funny if they started suing each other for stealing each other's content. As far as DoJ/DHS is concerned, they are government agencies with nearly unlimited financial resources and legal muscle that if they do get sued, they can drag that lawsuit on for decades with no resolution in sight, clearly not something regular Joe Schmoes like us can afford. And besides, they are the ones helping MAFIAA with website take-downs and DNS seizures, therefore, they are not the organization MAFIAA and their members would want to piss off.

One thing is for sure though. If DoJ/DHS employees are that free to do torrenting from their corporate network(s), no wonder they get hacked as often as they do.

TSWYO
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Re: Engaging in piracy? or join swarms to catch pirates?

Usually the Admins and the IT staff are not behind the filters.. It would be interesting indeed to see the names.
CXM_Splicer
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Re: Ok.

said by skeechan:

Companies are free to pick and choose who they sue so ultimately their own rampant piracy is largely irrelevant unless some local AG goes after them for something which is unlikely given their connections.

What it does do is invalidate their claims of piracy being a "problem" given they don't bother to clean up their own messes.

Very true. I would go so far as to say that it could cost them court cases. If the claimed 'loss' numbers are brought into question and shown to be deliberately inflated (by including industry piracy that they won't pursue) a judge could dismiss the whole case. It would be very interesting if a defendant subpoenaed the entire list given by an ISP and brought to light the people who were let slide.

Another legal point is related to 'implied license'... if (for instance) Arista allows RCA to share a song that Arista owns (by not pursuing them) how can they then argue that someone else downloading that song from RCA is 'stealing'?

Pirate515
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said by silbaco:

They have business accounts. Business accounts will never have 6 strike policies.

From DMCA standpoint, the procedure is the same for individuals or businesses. If a copyright holder flags an IP address distributing their content illegally, their service provider gets contacted to reveal the name behind the IP (be it an individual or a business). Businesses are probably much easier for ISP's to pinpoint given how many of them have static IP's and even dedicated IP ranges. Of course, some ISP's might think twice before ratting out a business that's bringing a sizable revenue compared to individual Joe Schmoes like us, but since DMCA states that ISP will be liable for damages if they don't hand the name over, at the end of the day they do it anyway.
Pirate515

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said by skeechan:

Companies are free to pick and choose who they sue so ultimately their own rampant piracy is largely irrelevant unless some local AG goes after them for something which is unlikely given their connections.

Sadly, this is true. In the law enforcement world, it's called selective enforcement. If five cars in front of you are speeding yet you turn out to be the unlucky one who gets pulled over and gets a ticket, you can't argue that you cannot be punished unless the 5 speeders in front of you are punished as well.
said by skeechan:

What it does do is invalidate their claims of piracy being a "problem" given they don't bother to clean up their own messes.

Not only that, but it also exposes the hypocrisy within that industry. If piracy affects livelihoods of everyone who works in that field, how do they expect the rest of the world to respect what they do when their own coworkers won't do the same for them?
Pirate515

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Re: Engaging in piracy? or join swarms to catch pirates?

The place where I work right now is pretty lenient too. P2P is a huge no-no because if "copyright police" nails someone, the entire company gets sued. As far as other stuff goes (as long as it's not illegal), it usually gets looked at the other way if it doesn't get in the way of your productivity. However, if management and coworkers notice that someone is slacking off and not pulling their weight, logs could be used against them. So if someone had stuff to do on any given day and none of it was touched, while at the same time logs show that that someone was on Facebook all day long, that someone will have a sit-down with the higher-ups.

Key-logging is pretty low, but it's not like they don't have right to do it.
Pirate515

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Seriously doubt that you will ever see the names. Even if they do get sued, if the infringing IP gets traced to a business, that business gets sued, has to defend themselves in court and pay up if they lose. Whether or not that business can then pinpoint individual culprit(s) and how to handle them is their own business.

skeechan
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skeechan

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A business will just pay the 3K rather than hire counsel to defend. That is that the mafiaa count on.

Pirate515
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Pirate515

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said by skeechan:

A business will just pay the $3K rather than hire counsel to defend. That is that the MAFIAA count on.

I somehow think that if MAFIAA goes after some business, they'd want a lot more than $3K. MAFIAA knows that businesses that have been around for a while has a lot more money in the bank than private citizens like us and can be shaken down harder.

They have to pick their fights when it comes to businesses though. If they are not careful enough, they could end up picking on someone of their own size or bigger with either either in-house top-notch legal team or enough money to be able to afford one that can fight them, possibly win and set precedent against future nonsense of this sort.

skeechan
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skeechan

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Then the business will fight because it has the resources just as Verizon frequently did.

NormanS
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Re: Ok.

said by silbaco:

They have business accounts. Business accounts will never have 6 strike policies.

Despite that businesses have equally rampant piracy as residential services, and deeper pockets. From which I deduce that the business of business is to piss on the consumer.
Rekrul
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Re: I think

said by ropeguru:

The courts should start taking the stance that until the industries start applying their law suits across the board, then they will all be thrown out of court.

Laws are for the little people...